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Tuesday, 28 February 2012

Most
readers of this paper will be familiar with Oswald Mosley’s now oft
quoted response, from the late 1960s, to The
Times newspaper,
“I
am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on
the left and is now in the centre of politics” (Letter
to The Times 26 April, 1968).

From
the beginning, Oswald Mosley was never of ‘the Right’, that lazy
political pigeon-holing practiced unscrupulously by both
reactionaries and self-styled ‘progressives’. I have always
understood ‘the Right’ to be that alignment of forces best
characterised by a resistance to change, a preference for an old
order of hierarchy and an undying fixation for discipline, punishment
and the suppression of the ‘lower classes’. Racismand suchlike, however, are manifested throughout
society and cut across political parties. When he first stood for
Parliament in a Harrow constituency as a young army officer returned
from the First World War, he coined the phrase ‘socialistic
imperialism’ which must have confused some of his more strictly
Tory electors. He stood as a Conservative Unionist and won the seat,
of course, later opting for a position as an Independent Member of
Parliament.

What
did he mean when describing his election platform as ‘socialistic
imperialism’? The British Empire was at its height of expansion,
enjoying influence across several continents. Britain truly ruled the
waves but the mass of people in Britain still lived in relative
poverty. Worse still, many hundreds of thousands had been conscripted
into a terrible war that lasted for four years, involving massive and
unnecessary loss of life. Mosley was a cavalry officer (16th Lancers)
who fought in both trench and in air. In those days, officers and men
often shared the same conditions and the same fate. This bond of what
he later called “the war generation” was at the core of his later
political motivation and it began, then, on returning, only for him
to discover that the same hard faced men, as he called them, were
still in power and had no intention of giving the ex-soldiers a land
fit for heroes to live in. Many of them had made big profits out of
that war. Mosley’s ‘socialistic imperialism’ was his response
to all that.

Then
you would ask, but why stand as a Conservative Unionist if you want
to espouse socialism? Why not simply join the Labour Party of Keir
Hardie and the working man? The answer to these questions can best be
explained in terms of Mosley’s social background (a sixth baronet,
a baronetcy going back to the English Civil War on the side of the
Royalists) and the class in which he moved. Standing as a Unionist
(as opposed to a trade unionist) came with the title. His bonding
with the men of the trenches, however, nurtured a quite different
philosophy.

It
seemed that Mosley was simply looking for an excuse to go over to the
Labour Party at the earliest opportunity. After all, crossing the
floor of the House of Commons is not a frequent occurrence and it
involves a serious act of deep faith in political terms. He found it
when he took up the cause of the Irish against the use of the Black
and Tans in the early 1920s. Not for nothing did T.P. O’Connor, the
Irish Nationalist MP, call Mosley “the greatest friend of Ireland”.

It
was in the Labour Party of Ramsay MacDonald that his ‘socialistic
imperialism’ found its true home or so he thought. Not everyone
welcomed him there. Some thought him too
‘socialistic’ and they made that very clear to
him. For a few, they resented his background and wealth and felt
rather put in the shade by Mosley’s flamboyant personality. In his
first fight for a Labour seat in Ladywood, Birmingham, he called for
the nationalising of the mines, the railways ... and the banks. The
Tory press gave him a rough time and he was narrowly defeated. On
December 4th 1926, Mosley was again adopted, this time as the
candidate for Smethwick and he won with a majority of 6,582 —
his future in the Labour Party was secured despite
the vicious press attacks. In the couple of years after his defeat at
Ladywood, Mosley took time to formulate what became known as the
Birmingham Proposals which were arguments against laissez-faire
economics, in favour of planning. They
were radical ideas for curing unemployment, a common theme throughout
his political life. He had seen the slums and the poverty in a few
major cities, including Liverpool, and commented, “The re-housing
of the working class ought in itself to find work for the whole of
the unemployed for the next ten years”. In my years in Union
Movement I recall part of the policy as “treating housing as a
national problem ... *the housing of the people should be taken
seriously and treated like a problem of war”.

Today,
we have the problem of so many empty properties (not slums) along
with an army of the homeless. There was a previous government policy
of mass clearance but they failed to replace them with the new, as
promised. Mosley would have treated the problem differently, bringing
down costs through methods of mass production.

Mosley’s
greatest strength lay in his powerful grasp of economics and it is my
contention that he should have stayed in the Labour Party despite
internal opposition to his radical proposals. Even old adversaries
like Manny Shinwell stated much later in 1968 that if he were more
patient he would have won and made an enormous contribution to Labour
politics and to the country. To a technocrat like Mosley, fascism had
one main appeal and that was the freedom to act, to make things work,
which it seemed was denied him by the old reactionaries within the
Labour Party and who still clung to the laissez-faire
economic theories of the previous
century. The irony there was that Mosley confessed shortly after the
Second World War that fascism “rode roughshod over civil
liberties”, which seemed to cancel out the advantages of unbridled
government action. In the late 1940s he had to all intent and
purposes rejected fascism and called for European
Socialism instead.

Fascism’s
appeal to Mosley was as to a man concerned with the problems of
unemployment and the serious faults within the economic system. It
started as a vehicle for realising his goals, set originally while a
member of a Labour government, given the responsibility for curing
mass unemployment. He proposed very radical reforms on Keynesian
lines, since adopted by subsequent governments, but were rejected
then despite an appeal to Labour’s parliamentary party. He should
have stayed put as most of his closest friends and supporters were
then urging him to do.

This
is what the left-wing historian A.J.P. Taylor meant when he wrote in
English History, 1914-1945,
“Mosley alone rose to the challenge ... his proposals offered a
blueprint for most of the constructive advances in economic thinking
to the present day ... an astonishing achievement, evidence of a
superlative talent”.

Then,
the Labour politician, Richard Crossman in 1961, “Capable of
becoming either Conservative or Labour Prime Minister ... revealed as
the outstanding politician of his generation ... Mosley was spurned
by Whitehall, Fleet Street and every party leader at Westminster
simply and solely because he was right” ... and so the accolades
poured forth long after Mosley’s departure from the old party
system.

The
What If? books
edited by Robert Cowley (published by Pan Books) offer some
intriguing hypotheses in the form of essays written by eminent
historians. There is one subject missing in this series of
thought-provoking books and it is “If
Oswald Mosley had stayed in the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald
and bided his time”.

I
believe Britain would have been a better place if he had.

It
is not Mosley the fascist leader that should be celebrated. No, not
at all. It is Mosley the Labour Party socialistthat more properly defines his true political home
and the cradle of his ideas as political reformer and economist.

“Parliament
invented me”, was a typical Mosleyism. He was the parliamentarian
par excellence and
his command of polemic was wasted on the visceral outpourings of
fascism. He once said he was tired of men who think but preferred
instead the company of men who feel; which is extraordinary coming
from a man with such a brilliant mind. He was reaching out to the
“war generation”, many of whom were then filling the ranks of his
Blackshirt ‘legions’ within the BUF.

British
fascism did not miss the potency of the emotional over the
essentially intellectual. It made a virtue of it so much so, that it
tended to supersede the latter.

Mosley’s
speeches as a fascist leader, although permeated with some of the
more romantic allusions, were fundamentally reasoned and filled with
economic analysis reminiscent of his days in the House of Commons.
The parliamentarian always emerged. The ‘fascist’ was simply an
adopted mantel.

He
later remarked when being interviewed by James Mossman on a BBC
Panorama programme in 1968 that, “I exhausted every means in the
Labour Party of getting my policies accepted before I left. First of
all, the Parliamentary Party; secondly the Conference. And not until
I was rejected and defeated in every attempt to get the Labour Party
to accept it did I go over with precisely the same policy —
and this is so curious — and
start the fascist movement. Having been denounced as the wild man of
the Left by Snowden and others, I was then supposed to become a
right-wing reactionary. But my policy was precisely the same”.

His
policy was indeed the same which would more or less confirm that he
had not changed his views but simply the modus
operandi for putting them across.
Dressed in his black shirt, he remained a socialist through it all,
speaking for Britain and the British working man. It also explains
the fact that British fascism under Mosley’s leadership was not a
right-wing movement ... even though it did attract some right-wing
people.

All
through the years of the British Union of Fascists and then the
considerably longer years of Union Movement, Mosley the socialist
from the old Labour Party shone through like a golden thread of
honourable consistency, never losing sight of that noble purpose
coming back from the trenches with the ‘war generation’. The
sacrifice has yet to be atoned.

From
the beginning, it has been the purpose of this publication to put the
record straight in face of the many misrepresentations. If you want
to obsess with the fascist phase of Mosley’s career then do so ...
but with one stipulation of understanding. It is that British fascism
was no more than a temporary vehicle for a set of ideas that have
their roots in the Labour Party. Those ideas were to transcend issues
of political party and organisation. Developed in the Labour Party,
they are essentially socialist in nature. That they were rejected is
less an indictment of the Labour Party itself but more a comment on
the short-sighted stupidity of those leading it at the time.

It
seems perfectly reasonable to describe the post-war platform as
European Socialist,
given the loss of Empire as an economic dimension. Not ‘socialistic
imperialism’ in the old sense but a revised European creed with
Europe as the new ‘empire’.

You
can not understand Mosley without looking at his parliamentary career
and his struggle within the MacDonald government around the time of
1930. Although he always put Britain first, he was never a
nationalist in the narrow sense, as with the far-right fringe. He
further coined the phrase “to do great things in a great way” ...
an echo of his proposals as a member of the Labour Party.
Nationalism, by its narrow thinking, can only do things in a small
way. Today, they have to blame the Muslims through complete lack of
constructive policy.

Unlike
“the Right”, supporters of European Action possess a deeply held
collective social conscience. It is a moral regard for others, a
desire to solve the great social problems of this age through
changing the system that is largely responsible for most of our ills.

Unlike
“the Right”, we have an extensive policy that would lead to an
end to social exploitation and the dominance of international finance
(globalism) in the affairs of nations. We subscribe to the political
and economic ideas of Oswald Mosley ... which is why we are European
Socialists.

ESA No 7 January/February 2006

ESA No 6, September/October 2006

ESA No 5, July/August 2006

ESA No 4, May/June 2006

ESA No 3, March/April 2006

ESA No 2 January/February 2006

The Editor

I have been editing a bi-monthly hard copy paper since 2005. Our platform is one of promoting a concept of European unity first proclaimed by Sir Oswald Mosley in 1948. I am a former member of his post-war movement, being at one time West London Area Organiser.